


The Dread Wolf Has Too Many Eyes

by ChocolateChipFic (Leigh_B)



Series: Momvellan and Papa!Franken!Solas [4]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: As so he appears!, Dammit Solas, Fade things, Magic, Mixing Animal Shapes, Odd Forms, Shadow Wolf - Freeform, Stress Induced Laughter, The Fade, You are so fucking pretty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-08
Updated: 2016-04-08
Packaged: 2018-05-31 22:41:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6490174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leigh_B/pseuds/ChocolateChipFic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lavellan and Franken!Solas finally meet. It is unorthodox and odd, but so is everything else about this series of ficlets... so.... yeah.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Dread Wolf Has Too Many Eyes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Feynite](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Feynite/gifts).



She noticed his fragmented presence the moment it susurrated around them. At first, she wasn’t entirely sure that it was anything more than the night’s earlier chills creeping under her skin again and setting her brain to building monstrous horrors in the hollows of her mind. But slowly, she noticed an observational quality to the nothingness abounding in the empty hall. It was looking at her.

 

He was looking at her.

 

She sat up straight and attempted to pinpoint a physical center for the sensation. Did he stalk from a corner? Hiding in the darkness, body coiled in a proper predator’s crouch. Did he lurk beyond the Veil? Close enough to sense, but a world away from her eyes and fists.

 

No. Not fists. She would not win. To fight was to lose, and Lavellan was not in a position to falter.

 

Her eyes caught a red gleam peering from the thickest shadows in the room. He was not hiding in the darkness. He was made of it.

 

One large paw ventured boldly into the cast of the moon through the windows. It was the size of a great bear’s and curiously similar in shape. It was not entirely like a bear’s paw, though not a wolf’s either. Somewhere in-between. It was clawed and wide, forelimbs shaped to deliver skull-crushing blows and easily rend flesh from bone. Opaque gloom dripped, saturated and dense, from the thick fur over his form as the rest of his being coalesced. It was the eyes though, that ruined the normalcy Lavellan attempted to prescribe to his shape. They were just too weird for her to overlook them in order to cling to the last threads of her control.

 

She had always had a thing about creatures with multiple eyes. She did not like to consider it a fear. It was more of an apprehension. Things with too many eyes looked glassy and apathetic. They did not blink correctly. They did not know how to look at something without implying that they were going to eat it. Spiders had too many eyes.

 

Spiders had too many eyes, and the Dread Wolf had too many eyes.

 

She crushed her fear, suppressing it behind a ferocious wave of protective instinct as she squeezed the child closer with one arm. She raised the other in an indicator of gathering offensive magic. It was done with a complete lack of forethought. All of the diplomatic measures that Lavellan had fancied while she waited withered under his unblinking six-eyed stare.

 

“Do you mean to keep her from me?” a disembodied voice whispered from the general direction of the phantasmagorical manifestation. The tone hissed over Lavellan, buzzing in her ears and grazing over the gooseflesh of her arms like the fine edge of a razor.

 

Another paw stepped into the light, languidly pulling the newly extracted physical beast into illumination. His teeth, glinting silver in the moon’s glow, peeked from an open maw. He was scenting the room in quick huffs, tongue wetting his nose in order to catch the more elusive nuisances in the air. He _was_ a wolf, she realized. Too big, and too horrific, but a wolf by the ears and the muzzle. The general shape of him, if not for the extra eyes and strange anterior anatomy, supported that identification.

 

Lavellan was floored. She’d meant to respond, opened her mouth to do so, and left it gaping. Her elegant and poignant speech fled and left her empty and frightened. Her panic creeped out before her response, and it dulled the effect significantly.

 

“If I must…” she ground the words out, breathless, but lacking none in conviction. She hugged the girl more tightly.

 

The Dread Wolf sat, cocking his head like a curious cattle dog and lapping over his nose again. “There will be no need for that, nor for you to be frightened.”

 

His voice still existed in an incorporeal state, humming against her skin. She registered that he’d said not to be scared, but found that it made little difference. Here he was, the fucking Dread Wolf, flashing a mouthful of fangs and oozing out of the shadows to shape a body meant for killing. What was she to do _other_ than be frightened?

 

This incredulous rush of insistent fear flashed through the room before she had time to examine the ramifications of sharing such a reflection. The Dread Wolf blinked, one eye at a time, in a random order until they’d all widened into a somewhat bashful expression for an alien canine face.

 

“Ah,” he noted, the bottom two eyes glancing down at his animalistic form while the upper sets drifted awkwardly away from her stare. “Yes. This was not the shape that I had intended to manifest. My apologies.”

 

Apologies? _What_?

 

 “If you’ll give me a moment, Lavellan, it is somewhat elusive to filter the quantities of magic necessary for shapeshifting through the Veil. I will be in a more suitable form shortly.”

 

Lavellan panicked, terrified by the prospect of the Dread Wolf knowing her clan name. It quickly dawned on her that the child had known as well, and that this being had loved some version of her, at some point, in some reality that shared this name. It got her to wondering, and the banal distraction did her mind good. To think coherently eased her anxiety, as did watching the glow of magic begin to infuse into the anatomy of the monstrosity before her.

 

If her clan name had always been the same, what about her given name? Did he know what her personal name was?

 

What about his? What was his name? Was he simply Fen’Harel and nothing more?

 

His shape became incongruous as it shrank down and reformed. The heft of the beast’s bulk shed away, as did its fur. All unnecessary aspects disappeared seamlessly into the shadows from which they had come. What was left was, indeed, one of the most attractive elves Lavellan had ever seen.

 

She laughed suddenly, a bark of exasperation that caused the child to jerk. Lavellan removed her eyes from the porcelain skin and devastating cheekbones lurking across the room to look down at the girl in her lap, overwhelmed suddenly by the child’s resemblance to her father. There was no denying it now that she’d seen him. The girl had his features two-fold over her own. She started running her fingers through her daughter’s dark hair again, and what little tension her outburst had summoned melted out of the girl’s body with a few deep breaths.

 

She had a lot of rest to catch up on, after all.

 

“What, may I ask,” he began. His words, when properly formed in a throat, were a dead match to the child’s earlier impressions of him. Deeper, of course. His voice made Lavellan continue to snicker in spite of herself. “Is it that you find so amusing?”

 

The woman looked back up at him, ethereal and beautiful and wholly bemused.

 

“This may sound rude out of context,” Lavellan warned. “But I laughed initially because I think that your nose is not as unappealing as Da’len had made it seem.”  

**Author's Note:**

> As always! I have all of the gratitude toward the people who put time into reading my work. Thank you so very much! And, again, another special thank you to the amazing Feynite. It is only a matter of time before I start publishing odes to that amazing woman. They're even gonna' be in iambic pentameter. *nods*


End file.
